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Mirwood Records
25th September 2012
In the beginning came Ric Tic and Mirwood. Obviously Tamla and definitely Okeh were huge and vital, but I think the small indies with the big punch epitomised what was then known as Old Soul. That would be around late ’68 to early ’70 before the music was known as Northern Soul.
Run by Randy Wood, a savvy music businessman with years of experience at the black-owned Vee-Jay company, and having hit from the off with Jackie Lee’s ‘The Duck’, the signs were good for the new Mirwood label. The genius young arranger James Carmichael gave veteran Los Angeles producer Fred Smith the impetus of his youth and that vibes-laden rhythm of the dance craze hit laid the foundation for the next two years of soul dance perfection. The final piece of the jigsaw was Sherlie Matthews, a brilliant arranger of backing vocals whose knack for capturing the “Swinging Sound Of Young Hollywood” would result in some masterly compositions for the label.
Fred Smith not only brought Jackie Lee and Bob Relf (aka Bob & Earl) to the party, but threw in veteran vocal group the Olympics, all acts he had worked with previously. It took the company two goes to make the charts with the Olympics when ‘Mine Exclusively’ went to #25 R&B in mid-66. Their biggest hit for the label was the next one, ‘Baby Do The Philly Dog’, the epitome of the uptempo soul groove – too slick for the average English teenager but perfect for the breed who hung out in smoke-filled basement dives, powered by pills and a love of the music of black America. ‘Philly Dog’ was released at the time on UK Fontana; those cherished copies acted as the swansong for the soul mods but became the revered soundtrack to the Old Soul religion.
Sherlie Matthews tried to get in on the act performing with the Holloway sisters, Brenda and Patrice, on the Belles’ ‘Don’t Pretend’ and providing ‘He’s Alright With Me’ for her good friends the Mirettes (previously known as the Ikettes). She found she was too busy composing and writing backing vocal charts to concentrate on a career of her own and it was a fact that Mirwood’s best-sellers were recorded by the guys.
Jackie Lee came back strong with the storming ‘Your P-E-R-S-O-N-A-L-I-T-Y’ and ‘Do The Temptation Walk’ while his partner in Bob & Earl, Bob Relf (aka Bobby Garrett), joined in with ‘My Little Girl’, whose backing track was erroneously issued on a UK release and became a Northern monster. The Olympics hit back with the double-sider ‘The Same Old Thing’ / ‘I’ll Do A Little Bit More’, the latter title being sampled by DJ Fat Boy Slim and grooved to unknowingly by trendy young Brits decades later.
There were interesting one-offs from Jimmy Thomas, J.W. Alexander, Chicago group the Sheppards and a jazz/soul keyboard groove from session men the Hideaways as well as odd little pop pieces scattered throughout.
For me the company peaked with Jackie Lee’s magnificent ‘Oh My Darlin’’ which, although it still had the on-the-fours rhythm, was so much more than a dance record with a pleading vocal over the perfect backing track – a three-minute musical masterpiece. The adjacent release was Jackie’s duet with Dolores Hall, ‘Whether It’s Right Or Wrong’, a gorgeous, heartfelt soul ballad.
But these releases did not sell and Randy Wood tried outside sources for further success. The main one was Hank Graham’s Hangra stable which used Jimmy Conwell, Len Jewell Smith and Goodoy Colbert’s writing and producing talents. There were two releases on Jimmy Conwell, the second under the alias Richard Temple. The first was the instrumental ‘Cigarette Ashes’, which famously fetched the highest price ever for a 45 in the early 70s and was released in the UK within weeks; the vocal version, ‘That Beatin’ Rhythm’, grew into the epitome of Northern Soul. This production team also worked two excellent releases on Bay Area group the Performers.
That’s the American side of the story. The UK picture was possibly even more enthralling. Collectors knew the first releases from the early UK Fontana singles and the belated 1968 issue of “The Duck” LP on London. Odd Mirwood imports would slowly filter over to the UK and gradually a picture of the label built up in DJs’ and collectors’ minds. The releases weren’t super-scarce but hard enough to locate to become precious and beautiful to behold. The cachet of the vocal and instrumental versions of ‘My Little Girl’ and ‘That Beatin’ Rhythm’ added to the wonder and mythology of Mirwood. It became one of the first labels to be cherished but also one of the first to be exhausted, although the brand was kept alive by a series of dubious early 70s pressings made from the master tapes accessed by LA-based UK Northern Soul wheeler-dealer Simon Soussain. Those pioneering initial finds would also be among the first records spun in the hugely popular Wigan Casino oldies room Mr M’s and the later Friday Oldies All-Nighters.
Ace Records purchased the label in 2003 and we found unissued masters such as Bobby Garrett’s ‘Keep It Coming’, Jackie Lee’s soulful ‘Trust Me’ and the Belles’ cute ‘Cupid’s Got A Hold On Me’. We were able to unravel some of the mysteries that Soussain had initiated with his misinformation. The Belles ‘Let Me Do It’ was actually the Mirettes singing ‘I Wanna Do Everything For You Baby’ and Jackie Lee’s ‘I’ll Do Anything’ was really called ‘Anything You Want, Any Way You Wanna’. They were issued on the two volumes of the “Mirwood Soul Story” CDs and the correct writers credited at last. We found many relevant documents in the paperwork and were able to recount the history of the record company for the first time in any depth.
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Marvell Thomas
24th January 2017
All at Ace were deeply saddened today to hear that upper echelon Memphis musician Marvell Thomas has died at the age of 75. Marvell’s work as a musician has long been a feature of the catalogues of almost every label in the Ace family. He’s probably on more of our Stax-derived releases than almost any other musician who ever set foot in the label’s McLemore Avenue studios, given that he was there almost from the day Stax opened for business until the day that bankruptcy forced its closure fifteen years later.
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The Sonics
2nd October 2012
There probably has never been a greater example of rock’n’roll revisionism than the current respect accorded to the Sonics. Cult heroes may come and go, but the Sonics’ ascension to become the quintessential garage rock band of all time is truly remarkable. Unlike, say, the Stooges or the Velvet Underground, there was really no awareness of the Sonics, outside of their native Pacific Northwest, until the late 1980s. Slowly but surely, the bands distinctive brand of noise has percolated up through generations of rock fans to almost enter the mainstream. For instance, in the past few years, the Sonics’ paint-peeling take on Richard Berry’s ‘Have Love Will Travel’ has been a regular fixture of television ads the world over.
There’s a simple reason why the Sonics strike such a chord. Theirs is likely the sharpest definition of garage rock that has ever existed. The rough-hewn quintet from blue-collar Tacoma, Washington drew from the implicit rawness of the 50s heroes like Little Richard and Jerry Lee, revved it up with post-British Invasion attitude, threw in the Northwest’s own unique translation of R&B energy, and in the process arrived at a sound that is the very essence of what rock should be: rock’n’roll boiled down to its very nub.
The core of the Sonics were the Parypa brothers, Larry on guitar and Andy on bass, who founded the group in the late 1950s. Like every other neophyte rock’n’roll combo in the Northwest, they looked up to local bigwigs the Wailers for inspiration. The embryonic group mutated through different personnel until singer and keyboardist Jerry Roslie entered the fray in late 1963, bringing along his school pals Rob Lind on sax and Bob Bennett on drums. Within months of this new line-up coming together, a drastic change occurred. Together as a band, the Sonics amped up their sound to a cruder, rougher style, in an almost subconscious attempt to distil the furious energy that beat at the heart of the rock’n’roll and R&B they so enjoyed.
Headquartered at teen hotspot The Red Carpet in the Tacoma suburb of Lakewood, where the Sonics regularly jammed the joint, it wasn’t long before Buck Ormsby of the Wailers grabbed the quintet for the Wailers’ own Etiquette label. A first attempt to harness their fury in the recording studio left the group non-plussed, but when ‘The Witch’ was released in November 1964, it quickly began to get heavy airplay, capturing the imagination of teens around Puget Sound and beyond. No-one had heard rock quite that visceral on the radio in recent memory.
The follow-up, ‘Psycho’, was recorded in the spring at Kearney Barton’s famed Seattle facility, and was another Roslie-penned hamburger-throated opus. It became as big a hit with audiences and radio around the Northwest as ‘The Witch’, and both tunes rocked the airwaves well into the summer of 1965. The Sonics’ fiery template was firmly established by these first two singles, along with the fabulous sequels ‘Boss Hoss’ and ‘Shot Down’, and the entire contents of the album “Here Are The Sonics” - surely one of the most uncompromising debuts in rock history. Rather than pad out the record with the expected hits of the day, the band filled the grooves with choice interpretations of rock’n’roll and R&B classics, all laden with their patented trademarks – searing, abrasive guitar tones, guttural vocals and pounding, unrelenting drums. And Roslie displayed a very real knack for writing – and screaming - ear-catching originals such as the classic ‘Strychnine’.
Throughout most of 1965, the Sonics wreaked havoc on audiences the length and breadth of the Northwest and beyond, and simultaneously upped the ante of the entire region’s music scene. Most remarkably, the bands dynamism even effected a change upon their mentors the Wailers, whose post-Sonics recordings very clearly bore signs of their former apprentices’ influence. October of 1965 saw the release of a fourth Etiquette single, perhaps the most ferocious to date: ‘Cinderella’/ ‘Louie Louie’ was a double-whammy of epic proportions. It was accompanied by the Sonics’ second album, “Boom”, recorded at the lo-fi Wiley/Griffith studio in Tacoma but nevertheless continuing in the same full-blooded vein as previous releases.
Word had seeped out to other parts of the country about this wild young combo, and Sonics releases were getting a lot of interest from radio stations in markets as far away as Pittsburgh and Florida. This led the group to question Etiquette’s efficiency, and miscommunication between band and label ultimately meant that the Sonics decided to part ways with Ormsby in the spring of 1966. Waiting in the wings was Jerry Dennon, whose well-distributed Jerden imprint had most of the Northwest’s talent under contract. Dennon romanced the band with the possibility of national success.
At first, the Sonics’ Jerden singles acted as a natural progression from their no-holds-barred Etiquette sides, and the initial single, ‘You’ve Got Your Head On Backwards’, a Brit-styled pounder sung by Lind, was a strong seller in the autumn of 1966. At Dennon’s behest, the group traveled to Gold Star in Los Angeles for the sessions that would become their third and final album, “Introducing.” In retrospect, the sides the group cut there are certainly far better than is generally acknowledged, and including screamers such as ‘High Time’ and ‘Like No Other Man’. But the Sonics never really recaptured in Hollywood the pure unadulterated magic that their Etiquette sessions had in abundance, something reflected by the diminishing sales of their later Jerden releases.
From there on, it seemed all downhill. The combo continued for another year, making their first and only trip back east, but the military was at the door, and once they had finished with their education, various band members began to drop out in 1967 or, like Roslie, just quit unexpectedly. The single ‘Lost Love’ was their last rocking effort but in truth, there didn’t seem to be a place for Sonics-style dementia in the face of flower power. In a cruel twist of fate, a faceless Holiday Inn lounge act inherited the band’s good name, and watered it down well into the next decade.
However, the legend of Tacoma’s once-raging rock machine began to gather moss after collectors outside the Northwest happened across the amazing Etiquette records, and began theorising in magazines such as Creem in the mid-1970s as to what kind of band could have created such a noise. Shortly afterwards, a renewed energy resurfaced in rock’n’roll that correlated exactly with the emotions that the Sonics had espoused a decade before: punk rock. The resourceful Ormsby had hung onto the band’s vintage masters, and began to reissue them in an attempt to keep the band’s memory alive. He eventually struck a deal with Big Beat for a comprehensive anthology of the Sonics’ Etiquette material, which was released in 1993 as “Psycho-Sonic”.
Fast forward to the late 2000s. “Psycho-Sonic”, now remastered after the discovery of ear-blasting first-generation tapes, is one of the best-selling items in the entire Ace Records catalogue, in the process turning a couple of generations onto the band’s savage sound. The best of the Sonics’ Jerden sides, including unissued material, is included on the exhaustive Big Beat series “Northwest Battle Of The Bands”. And in an unprecedented and exciting turn of events, the Sonics have recently reformed around the core of Jerry, Larry and Rob to dish out some long-overdue authentic Sonics rock’n’roll, delighting fans around the world in the process. Make sure you don’t miss them – but grab a hold of “Psycho Sonic” first, to properly understand what all the fuss is about.
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The Shirelles
15th May 2013
Early in 1961, Shirley Owens, Doris Coley, Beverly Lee and Micki Harris were topping the US chart with ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’. Here was an extraordinary development; four young black girls had over-ridden all the obstacles of money, influence and power that the music industry and media had erected against them and forced their way into the big time through sheer talent and the popularity of their sound. Some three decades later I met Shirley Alston-Reeves (nee Owens) in a New York recording studio (she’d earlier recorded a new version of the Shirelles’ old hit ‘Mama Said’ for a TV ad, using Valerie Simpson and Patti Austin as back-up girls), where she told me her story:
“All the guys around were singing in groups, doo wopping in the basements to get that echo-chamber effect. Beverly and I were good friends – we used to babysit a lot together – and decided to do the same thing. We started singing together just for fun, but our two voices just weren’t making it, so we asked Micki to join us. We heard Doris singing in the school choir. She had a powerful voice, so we asked her to join the group too. That’s how the Shirelles were formed, although we called ourselves the Poquellos at the time. Beverly gave us that name – we were all studying Spanish at school.
“One day we were fooling around singing in the school gym and the teacher caught us. She said that we could either enter the upcoming school talent show or we could stay after school. Of course we chose the talent contest.
“We got all excited about that and went out and bought matching outfits: little black taffeta skirts and long-sleeved nylon blouses. We decided to be different and not sing someone else’s song, so we wrote a song of our own. A few nights before the show we all got together and wrote ‘I Met Him On A Sunday (Ronde Ronde)’. It was about the days of the week. We just picked a day and sang something. Simple as that.
“We sang the song on the talent show, a cappella of course, and received a standing ovation. Everybody loved it. A classmate of ours, Mary Jane Greenberg, asked us to sing it for her mom, who had her own company, Tiara Records. We weren’t really interested in recording, but this girl kept asking us. She was becoming a pest and we ended up changing our route home from school so that we wouldn’t keep bumping into her.
“Eventually Mary Jane persuaded us to go to her house and sing the song for her mother, Florence Greenberg. She loved the song and wanted to sign us straight away.
“Our parents thought that we were too young to start travelling around the country and wanted us to finish school, of course. But we got all that sorted out and the rest is history, as they say. Our favourite female group was Arlene Smith and the Chantels and we tried to find a name as close as we possibly could to theirs because it was so pretty. We came up with Shanels, but were told it was too close. Florence wanted to call us the Honeytones. We had to decide real quickly because they needed it for label copy, so we decided on Shirelles, which we spelled from my name.
“Florence released ‘I Met him On A Sunday’ in 1958; it did quite well. As a result we worked quite a lot: parties mainly and private functions. It was at a show at the Howard Theater in Washington DC that we first heard ‘Dedicated To The One I Love’. We were on a bill with a group called the Five Royales; two or three of the guys in the group wrote it. Every time they sang it we would run down the stairs so that we could listen, because we liked it so much. Doris was really in love with the tune, so we told her that if she learned the lead, we would do the background.
“It was about this time that we first met Luther Dixon. Florence Greenberg introduced him to us. She said that she had a new producer for us and that he’d had some success with ‘Sixteen Candles’ that he’d written. We were so excited to meet him. He really was very good and went on to become a big part of our lives. He created our sound.
“The first track we worked on together was ‘Tonight’s The Night’, which he and I co-wrote, although I had been writing songs for a couple of years. Not just ‘I Met Him On A Sunday’ but some B-sides too – ‘Look A Here Baby’, ‘Slop Time’, ‘Mama Here Comes The Bride’. ‘The Dance Is Over’ is one of Luther’s songs that we used to perform a lot at the Apollo. We had a little skit that we loved to do. We dressed Doris up as a little old lady with a beat-up fur coat; it was real cute. Other times we’d each wear one black and one white shoe. We always tried to come up with something simple but different.
“As our records started becoming successful we began to work more and more – Dick Clark tours, 30 one-nighters, every night you’re in a different town. Dick Clark was wonderful. He rode on the buses with all the musicians. In the beginning we did one of the first integrated shows to play Alabama. We had to play out in an open field where everyone had to bring their own chairs, because there was no seating. They really didn’t want the show to go on. There was Johnny Mathis, Nina Simone, the Shirelles and Joey Bishop. The stage actually collapsed when Johnny Mathis was on; it was sabotaged or something. I remember everybody crying and screaming and running across the fields. Everybody was so afraid.
“I remember another time Dick Clark trying to persuade a Holiday Inn to let us stay there, but no matter what he said they wouldn’t let any of the black groups book in. There weren’t any black hotels down south, so we had to stay in little rooming houses. I remember being so afraid that the four of us Shirelles took one room and all slept sideways in the same bed. They were gambling and drinking in the halls, so we made Ronnie, our MC, sleep in a chair all night, jammed up against the door.
“When Luther first brought us ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’, I didn't like it. It was a nice lyric, but I didn’t think it was my style. He played me the demo disc with Carole King singing, just her and the piano. It was very laidback with no strings or anything. To me it sounded like a country and western song. I told Luther that I really did not want to sing it, it was too country. I was so nervous that he would make us change our style. But he persuaded me to do him a favour and record the song on the understanding that if it didn’t turn out well they wouldn’t release it or put it on an album. The song came to life at the session and, of course, went on to become our first #1. I laugh about that a lot now. After that, if there was ever a song I didn’t care for, they’d put it out on a single.
“Nothing much really changed after we reached #1. We worked more and made more money – not too much, just a little more. We weren’t too interested in the business side of things. We were happy going along, going to work and looking forward to our next show. As a matter of fact, sometimes we didn’t even know when we had a new record out. We used to take the bus from Passaicin to New York and walk up Broadway to the Scepter offices. There was a big restaurant called The Turf where all the writers and musicians used to hang out. As we walked by they’d come out and show us our new record in the chart in Cash Box. We hadn’t even bothered to find out how our new record was going.
“Royalties! What royalties?! Well, we did get some, but I can tell you that we didn’t get what we should have got. We didn’t get a fraction. We were told that money was being put in a trust for us, but when we turned 21 we found out that there was no money. I don’t know what happened to all the money, but everyone at the company seemed to be living really well. Florence has told us that she never did anything wrong and persuaded us to drop our law suits. She told us that it was the people around her that wasted all the money and that she didn’t have much money herself. It never spoilt our relationship with her, we still loved her.
“In 1975 I left the Shirelles to have my daughter Amber. Doris had left the group in ’68 to have her twins. I called Doris and asked her if she would take my place for a little while because I was having a baby. But when I returned they were settled and happy working as a trio and, truthfully, they froze me out. No-one would talk with me, which is pretty uncomfortable when you’re all in a car together travelling to jobs. Well, obviously, I was very hurt. Had we stayed together we wouldn’t have the problems these days with so many different Shirelles groups going around. Most of them are fake groups. But I wouldn’t want anyone to think that we split up because we hated each other. The fact of the matter is I loved these girls, probably too much. We wouldn’t have stayed together all those years if we hadn’t loved each other.”
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Bob Lind
20th December 2012
Robert Neale Lind was born in Baltimore, Maryland on 25 November 1942. His parents separated when he was five and his mother remarried a master sergeant in the Air Force. After several years of constantly moving home, the family settled in Denver, Colorado.
“When I was in the 7th grade I discovered rhythm and blues,” Lind recalled when I interviewed him in 2007. “Before that, I used to listen to Gene Autry, Tex Ritter and Burl Ives, particularly. Burl Ives shaped my whole life. I knew what a guitar was. I knew you kinda raked across the strings with a pick and made noises. But here was a guy who was playing with his fingers, singing about mysterious things, like bats with leather wings and cowboys dying in the streets of Laredo. Oh man, I’d never heard anything like it.”
When Lind was 10, his parents bought him a guitar. He took a few lessons, but lost interest. “A few years later I began to realise that I wasn’t a particularly handsome guy, I wasn’t real smooth, but the guys that played music got all the hot girls. I thought, ‘Me for that!’ But somewhere along the line, I actually got into music for its own sake.” Forming a duo with his pal Jerry, Lind’s first paying gig was at a used car lot. “I played guitar and we sang R&B. Now they call it doo wop but nobody called it that then. It was rhythm and blues – dark and dangerous. We got all the hot dogs we could eat. Then we formed a band and played the teen clubs, where you could work underage.”
After graduating from high school, Lind enrolled at Western State College in Gunnison,Colorado, where he studied theatre arts. “I wasn’t really very serious about college. I was serious about playing music, learning how to finger-pick. I would wake up in the morning, take a bunch of uppers and coffee, and write maybe five or six songs a day. Then I’d go hear somebody play or have a gig myself. I’d come back, stay up most of the night and write more songs. Most of my songs from that period of time came from that line between sleep and wakefulness. That’s where ‘Elusive Butterfly’ was written. This was during the folk boom. There were two schools around then. There was the Kingston Trio, the Journeymen and Peter, Paul & Mary – these very slick guys who wore the striped shirts. Then there was a whole undercurrent, like Judy Henske, Josh White and Phil Ochs. And Dylan, of course. I played a place called the Analyst quite a bit. The first guy to hire me, Al Chapman, owned the place. They had things on the menu like the Freud Burger and the Psycho Salad. I still credit Al Chapman with discovering me. Al taped one of my sets and made a little reel-to-reel of five of my songs. He suggested that I take the tape around to the record companies.”
By 1964 the folk scene had started to dry up in Denver, but was still thriving in San Francisco; Lind headed there. “I was scared to death, because I didn’t know if I could make it there. I didn’t know if I would be able to get work, but in no time at all I was earning … I’m not sure if you’d call it a living. I was holed up in a crummy little hotel where people would die on a daily basis. They’d be hauling stiffs out of there every day – old guys dying lonely deaths in front of the communal TV, or junkies overdosing. It should have depressed me, but I found it romantic. I was maybe 21. I felt like Kerouac, you know. I was there for about three months before I moved on.”
Lind left his belongings with a friend and got on a plane down to Los Angeles to shop around the tape Al Chapman had made for him. “Liberty Records had just bought a jazz label called World Pacific and there was a guy running it named Dick Bock – a strange guy, eats yoghurt, stands on his head, a real free thinker. Bob Dylan was very popular at the time with ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and the Byrds were happening, so they were looking for a folk rocker, a poet-with-guitar. I didn’t know that. I just went toLibertybecause it was the first on my list. I gave them this tape and they said, ‘Yeah, we’d like to sign you’. I was amazed. It was that easy. They signed me as a songwriter to their publishing company, Metric Music, and as a recording artist. I think they were much more excited about my songs than me as a singer.”
Meanwhile, noted arranger Jack Nitzsche was looking for material for artists he was producing. Lenny Waronker, the head of Metric Music, called Lind in to play Nitzsche some of his songs. “I thought that was the dumbest idea I could imagine. I knew who he was and I even had a copy of his “Lonely Surfer” album. This guy is classically trained. This guy is Phil Spector’s right-hand man. He writes those beautiful string lines. This is too crazy! What was a brilliant, classically trained arranger with his melodic scope going to hear in my twangy, folky little songs? So with great trepidation I sat down and plunked out a couple of my folky three-chord tunes. He turned to Lenny and said: ‘You finally got yourself an honest writer.’ I hadn’t thought of myself as honest. I just wrote what I felt. So I played a few more and he said, ‘Boy, this guy’s really good.’ Jack didn’t choose any of my songs for the acts he was producing that day, but I thought of our first meeting as a good ego-boosting experience.”
When it came time to record, Dick Bock was assigned to produce, but things didn’t work out. “There were some technical difficulties that had nothing to do with the music itself. So they were trying to find another producer. They were talking to Chad Stuart and Sonny Bono. Then they said, ‘Let’s try Jack Nitzsche’. Lenny remembered that he had expressed an interest and asked him if he’d like to cut me. Jack said, ‘Yeah.’ He came over to my place, a terrible little $50-a-month apartment onHawthorne. He looked at this place and said, ‘Man, you can’t create here in this awful place. Come and stay at my house.’ I’d only met him two or three times.”
Lind accepted Nitzsche’s offer and moved in to his house in the Hollywood Hills. Nitzsche and his wife, Gracia, were separated at the time. “It was an Odd Couple kind of deal. Jack and I both loved to drink and to get high. We had a beautiful friendship. He turned me on to music I’d never even heard of before. Fred Neil, Bulgarian folk music, all these jazz guys, classical music: Wagner – he loved Wagner! He had this wide cosmopolitan taste that spanned everything. Even when Gracia came back with the baby – and a more wonderful woman no one has ever met – he never kicked me out. Gracia treated me like a son, even though there wasn’t much difference in our ages. She was wonderful – aces as a person and as an artist. Gracia tended to crash early and when she went to bed, Jack and I would get drunk and put on Ray Charles or Otis Redding and cry like big maudlin babies.”
Lind’s first session with Nitzsche yielded ‘You Should Have Seen It’, ‘Truly Julie’s Blues (I’ll Be There)’, ‘Elusive Butterfly’ and ‘Cheryl’s Goin’ Home’. “‘Elusive Butterfly’ was five verses long. I wanted to do all five verses. Jack said no one would listen to a song that long, and I should only do two. Of course, he was right. Hal Blaine was the drummer. He was the drummer on every session done in LA in 1965. After we’d finished these four, the company was looking for a single. We both favoured ‘Cheryl’s Goin’ Home’. So we released that and – just to be safe, so we wouldn’t get split airplay – we put what we thought was the weakest song, ‘Elusive Butterfly’, on the other side. But the record went nowhere. There was no interest in it at all. Then a disc jockey in Florida turned it over and started to play ‘Elusive Butterfly’. It started to catch on, one market, then another.”
A month after the record’s release, Lind and Nitzsche returned to the studio to cut the eight tracks that would complete the “Don’t Be Concerned” album, released in February 1966. ‘Elusive Butterfly’ entered Billboard’s Hot 100 in January, eventually peaking at #5 in March, by which time ‘Remember The Rain’ / ‘Truly Julie’s Blues (I’ll Be There)’ had been released as Lind’s follow-up single.
“Things were very fast then. I think the “Don’t Be Concerned” album took about three sessions. The two World Pacific albums were recorded so close together that I kinda lump them both together in my mind. Later on I learned that all of these famous people had played on my sessions, like Carol Kaye. I didn’t know who Carol Kaye was! I didn’t know Henry Diltz was playing banjo, or Larry Knechtel was on keyboards. I do remember Leon Russell. He scared the hell out of everybody. He was a strange dude, with long, long hair, even for those times. He was quiet and scary, but he played great piano.”
Divided radio play resulted in ‘Remember The Rain’ and ‘Truly Julie’s Blues (I’ll Be There)’ each reaching the charts, albeit at only #64 and #65, respectively. Meanwhile, ‘Elusive Butterfly’ had taken off in Britain, prompting a promotional visit.
“I loved being in England. My managers, Greene & Stone, brought me over. There was a guy named Val Doonican who cut ‘Elusive Butterfly’ too. There were people who thought he was stealing food out of my children’s mouths, but I felt that when you write a song, you can’t claim ownership of it. Val Doonican’s version was different from mine, but I kinda liked that. I had a wonderful time in England. I met Eric Burdon, Paul Samwell-Smith, Keith Relf and a guy from the Pretty Things. He came up to our hotel one time. There were about 15 people in our room and we were all smoking this hash. He told us all this long improvised fantasy story. I thought what a great world this guy lives in!”
Bob Lind and Val Doonican each reached the Top 5 with ‘Elusive Butterfly’ in the UK, where Lind’s follow-up, ‘Remember The Rain’, was also a modest hit, as were Keith Relf’s recording of ‘Mr Zero’ and Adam Faith’s version of ‘Cheryl’s Goin’ Home’. “‘Cheryl’s Goin’ Home’ turned out to be my second most-recorded song. Cher recorded it, and the Blues Project, Noel Harrison and the Cascades did it. A group called the Rokes did an Italian language version, and one of ‘Remember The Rain’.”
May 1966 saw the opportunistic release of an album titled “The Elusive Bob Lind”. “I was 17 when I made that album. Some of my friends wanted records, so I got nine of them together, they put in $12 each, and I went and got an hour of studio time. I took my guitar and recorded these 12 songs – all acoustic, just me and my guitar – all in an hour. I got an acetate copy for everybody and thought that was the end of it. Jump ahead to Los Angeles. ‘Elusive Butterfly’ becomes a hit and my managers get a letter from Verve Folkways saying that they’d just bought these masters. The next thing I know, I hear this album that has strings, drums and all these other instruments, all dubbed over me and my guitar. They didn’t even get the titles right, and credited me with writing songs like ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ and ‘Song Of The Wandering Angus’. I suppose I should be flattered that some people like the album, but it’s a terrible piece of shit.”
With a Top 5 single to his name, Lind found himself in demand for TV appearances, but it was not the type of work he enjoyed. “My managers had a certain view of my career. Their decisions for Sonny & Cher were great. They were pop singers; they didn’t care. The kind of music that I wrote was intimate stuff. It was about feelings that are not general commodities that can be packaged. They were wrong for lip-sync shows with go-go dancers jumping around. It made no sense. This wasn’t the course that I was trying to follow. Right then I started hating the business. I had gotten bent and warped and taken so far away from the direction I was trying to head.”
In the spring of 1966 sessions began for his second World Pacific album, “Photographs Of Feeling”. When Verve released a single from their LP, World Pacific responded with ‘I Just Let It Take Me’ from the new sessions. A further Verve single was countered by ‘San Francisco Woman’ on World Pacific, but it too failed to reach the charts. The “Photographs Of Feeling” album, released in August 1966, was the last record Lind would make with Nitzsche.
“Jack had his demons. If I said something that struck him wrong, he would suddenly go off on me about ‘being a fucking star’. At that time, far from being ego-ed out, I was constantly scared shitless, but he seemed very threatened by the success of the records we had made together. He was a hard man to figure out. It didn’t particularly end well with our friendship. Over the next few years, we’d see each other every once in a while and get close again. Then things would get nasty and we’d float away into our separate worlds. I’ll never forget Jack’s generosity, his belief in my music, his love of my music. When I think of him today, I can’t think of anything but that patience and generosity of his, and the fact that he had confidence in me way before I had any in myself. Jack was a strange guy. I miss him.”
The singles ‘It’s Just My Love’ and ‘Goodbye Neon Lies’, both produced by Tommy Oliver, were Lind’s only other releases over the next five years. Disenchanted, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I was a drunk. I was an abuser of drugs. That wasn’t Jack’s influence. He and I were just similarly inclined. I just wanted to go the desert and get my head straight, but Santa Feended up being the place where I did some of my worst drinking and using. So go figure. But while I was there I wrote the songs for an album.” Recorded with arranger Jimmy Bond and producer Doug Weston, the “Since There Were Circles” album was released by Capitol in 1971. Not long afterwards, Lind quit the music business and settled in Florida.
“I just got more and more disgusted and sick of these people in suits who had no feeling for music, but were making all the musical decisions. It wasn’t that I nobly made the decision that, ‘None of that for me anymore’. It was a mutual decision. The music business and I both had distaste for each other. I was a pain to work with. Drugs and alcohol will do that to you. I felt like a fraud. I felt that I wasn’t as talented as people said I was. All that’s completely turned around with sobriety. I haven’t drunk and I haven’t used since 1977. Now I honour my audience and I honour my music. I see that there is value in what I do. And my music has improved with sobriety.”
Lind never stopped writing and worked for a while for Weekly World News. “It was a fun paper where you could dream up stories about Big Foot, witches, UFOs and space aliens. You get paid to make things up all day. By night, I’d write literary short stories. One of them was called Emmett’s Last Day, about a guy in the Everglades. Another was called Nuisance Calls. A screenplay I wrote won the Florida Screenwriters Competition in 1991, I’ve written five novels and I’ve had plays produced. One of them won the Bronze Halo Award. I just like to write. But music never left me. I continued writing songs and once in a while I played, if the vibe was right. I did the Indian River Festival with Arlo Guthrie, who’s an old friend. There are over 200 cuts of my songs – Nancy Sinatra, Cher, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Marianne Faithfull, Richie Havens, Eric Clapton, Carmen McRae, Johnny Mathis, the Turtles, Glen Campbell – so technically I don’t have to work anywhere I don’t wanna work.” Eventually his desire to make music returned. In 1998 he sold his Gold Wing motorcycle and bought something more dangerous, a tenor sax.
“I had never learned how to read music. I didn’t know chords. I didn’t understand music theory. It had been all instinct with me. I decided that when I learned the saxophone I was gonna learn it the right way. So I took lessons. I learned how to read music and I learned how to make chord charts. I learned why a major seventh is a major seventh, for example – what a D minor flat nine is. I made a little album for my friends, but I wasn’t much of a saxophone player. I was passable, but to be a good sax player takes years – more years than I really had to devote to it. But that’s really the thing that got me back into music. My melodic scope started to open and I started to write more jazz-oriented songs. I thought people had to hear these things, so I started gigging again.”
Signs of Lind’s cult following became apparent in 2001 when Britpop band Pulp recorded a song titled ‘Bob Lind (The Only Way Is Down)’. “What’s great about Britain is that there is a whole new generation of people who are interested in older artists, not just because of what they did in their prime, but what they’re doing now. About a third of the people who visit my website are from the United Kingdom. I think young people in England pay more attention to the history of music than people in America do. I’m baffled by the quality people who talk about me – Jarvis Cocker, Richard Hawley and Sean O’Hagan from the High Llamas, and that delightful madman, John Otway.” Closer to home, guitarist Jamie Hoover of US group the Spongetones released “Lind Me Four”, a CD EP of Lind compositions. Long-time fan Hoover subsequently played on “Bob Lind: Perspective”, a concert/documentary DVD produced and directed by filmmaker Paul Surratt.
A frequent live performer, but no fan of the recording process, Lind made some of his recent compositions available on a self-released CD, “Live At The Luna Star Café”. A new studio album, “Finding You Again”, eventually appeared here on Ace’s Big Beat label in 2012. “I’ve written at least 300 songs since my last LP came out. For 41 years I’ve known I have to get ‘product’ onto the market. Over those years, I talked to dozens of producers. Some, I knew right away were wrong for me. Others seemed right for a while, but egos (theirs and mine) crushed the trust needed for the fragile producer-artist relationship.”
Fortunately, Lind found a dependable producer in Jamie Hoover. “It started with me sending him a god-awful piano demo of ‘Finding You Again’. I love the song but the demo sucked, as all my self-made demos do. A week later I got an mp3. ‘Stunned’ is an understatement. Somehow he had transformed that piece-of-shit demo into a pulsing, exciting representation of the song. I kept playing it over and over, marvelling at how he had Frankensteined it to life. I sent him a simple demo of ‘Maybe It’s The Rain’. Again, he found the soul of the song, adding those tasteful electric guitar, bass and string lines. After he repaired and rejuvenated ‘Exeter (The Wedding Waltz)’, I called him up and said, ‘Who are we kidding? We’re making an album here!’. His love for my music brought out the best in his production artistry. He constantly sought to bring my ideas to life in his unique and creative way. All of the songs are new except ‘May’ and ‘How The Nights Can Fly’, both of which are over 30 years old – along with a first for me, the authorised release of a song I didn’t write. I’m genuinely happy with what we’ve done.”
His voice and songwriting undiminished by time, Lind still gigs regularly around theUSAand has performed in Europe in recent years. “Since There Were Circles” was reissued by RPM in 2006 and is still available. “Live At The Luna Star Café” and the “Perspective” DVD are obtainable via his website (http://boblind.com). “Finding You Again” and “Elusive Butterfly: The Complete Jack Nitzsche Sessions” are in catalogue at Ace.
With thanks to Bob Lind for the interview and to Dawn Eden, Spencer Leigh, Martin Roberts and Ben Vaughn for additional quotes.
photo (c) Henry Diltz